Don't plagiarize this work. You'll face dire consequences if you do.


PROLOGUE.

December 6 1999.

Etibosa slowly lifted up his head from his pillow and glanced again at the other end of the room. The feminine figure was still standing in front of his door, staring keenly at him, with dark shining blue eyes, hair the colour of blood that draped down the figure's shoulders, and a pale white face that didn't appear to possess a mouth or a nose. He had tried to scream but no sounds left his mouth. It was as if he had been struck dumb by fear. He tried to make a run towards the door but his legs refused to obey his orders. His head and arms could move but his legs couldn't. The most bizarre moment of his 13 year old life was becoming even more bizarre.

Suddenly, the figure began to move slowly towards him.

"Who are you? Stay away from me."

Etibosa tried to voice out these words but failed as his mouth couldn't make the sounds. Immediately, the figure stopped in its tracks as if following a command.

"I'm sorry to have frightened you. Please give me audience."

These words rang in Etibosa's ears like a bell. It was as if a young woman was speaking from inside his head.

"Please I have to talk to you. I need your permission." The voice rang again.

Etibosa starred into the face of the figure that was now standing in the middle of his room. All he could see were two bright blue eyes. There wasn't any opening anywhere else on the face let alone a mouth, but something inside of him convinced him that the voice ringing inside his head was the voice of the being in front of him.

"You don't need to make sounds with your mouth. I can read your mind. I had to mute your speech and paralyze you because I didn't want you alarming other humans. That was a line I wouldn't cross under any other circumstance. Please have mercy on me. I am only here to give you information that is your right to have."

Etibosa was dumbstruck by what the voice in his head had said. He wanted to ask who the being was and why it wanted to speak to him. Immediately the thought of asking these questions arose in his mind, the voice in his head responded:

"My name is Lidara. I am the gatekeeper of souls. I supervise the incarnation of souls into human bodies. During your incarnation something rare happened. Your soul was contaminated by a powerful dark entity and that entity has taken residence within you. I watched your soul before contamination and it was the purest human soul I had ever seen. I don't know why the merging occurred but I do know that the entity that merged with your original soul naturally feeds on negative human energies. You have within you the capacity for pure good and pure evil and as a conscious being, you have the decision to choose which to perform. The presence of such a sinster force might create certain compulsions that would seem inhumane. It could take any form. It's going to be hard for you to overcome but the decision to resist it or give into it rests solely with you. The choice is yours to make. I'm not for good or for evil but I am aware that good makes humans happier while evil does the reverse. The reason why I act subordinate to you is because the entity that resides within you is higher than me in the universal hierarchy. The purest expressions of good and that of evil occupy a privileged position in the universe and you possess within you the later. I know that most of what I say might be hard for you to grasp giving your young human age but everything I have said today will always remain in your memory until you are mature enough to understand this message. The entity within you will start to manifest once you begin puberty, because it's at this point that your capacity for freewill becomes activated. I have performed my duty. You won't see me ever again and I will never interfere in your life. Thank you for giving me audience."

After these words rang inside Etibosa's head, the figure in front of him disappeared and he could speak and move his legs.

I dey your back

LightQueen:
I dey your back

Good to know.

Chapter One

The smell of burnt human flesh pervaded the bus as it drove past a horrendous explosion that had occurred an hour before. Everyone inside the bus had their hands over their noses as they all stared in horror at the grotesque remains of their fellow humans scattered along the road. Burnt cars and motorcycles also constituted this gory sight and the charred remains of the occupants of these vehicles were still tucked nicely in their seats. Among the scorched pile was what seemed like the remnant of an SUV. The driver was still positioned in the driving seat, a partially mutilated human form sat to his right and three smaller human corpses occupied the backseat. At the foot of the person at the right of the driver was the burnt remains of an infant that appeared to have fallen from this person's arms. On a normal day, the site of the explosion would have been very busy, with stalls and petty roadside traders lining both sides of the road. There would also be a bevy of hawkers and an crowd of commuters waiting for vehicles. This explained the high number of casualties.

"Jesus Christ! Chai! See as people just die throway," a voice inside the bus bawled.

"Wetin even cus the explosion sef?" another voice asked in a shocked tone.

"Dey say na fuel tanker wey collide with danfo. The explosion happen just one hour ago," replied the driver who minutes ago was screaming into his phone.

"God is so merciful," a woman dressed in a black unbuttoned suit jacket, marching trousers and an inner red shirt spoke softly.
"Do you know I am an hour late from work? This is the route I take on my way to work everyday. My car broke down 10 minutes away from my apartment and I had to get a mechanic who I then had to leave the car with. I would most certainly have been plying this road at the time of the explosion."

"Madam thank God for your life oh," the driver replied. Two of my fellow drivers die for this explosion. Na one of my driver colleague just dey yarn me for phone now. The thing just dey pain me. Plus all the bus wey we don lose."

Etibosa sat right next to the woman in a suit. He was also late for work. He had overslept, despite the continuous beeping of his alarm bell. Maybe if he hadn't overslept he would have been plying that route at the time of the explosion. But unlike the woman who was now on the phone with her husband, he didn't think himself naive enough to regard such possible aversion of danger to be the result of the divine providence of God. He didn't even believe in the existence of a God or anything supernatural. He knew that majority of the victims that died in the explosion believed in the same God that the woman beside him believed in, and yet they still suffered such fate.

Etibosa's lack of belief in the existence of the supernatural and his unwavering subscription to materialism seemed quite ironic giving the experience he had 20 years ago and the recurrent dreams that followed. Despite the encounter with Lidara still being as vivid in his memory as it had been 10 minutes after he experienced it, he had trained himself to dismiss it as a mere dream.

"There is no such thing as a soul," he would say to himself during his ruminations. He was of the strong opinion that humans were just highly intelligent animals that evolved the capacity for self examination and higher levels of thought and creativity. From this arose the tendency to smuggle a God or divine interference into any gaps they had in their understanding of the nature of reality. He thought that the idea of reincarnation was just the invention of ignorant stone age cultures who preserved and passed on fabricated tales into modern culture. He had also tried to dismiss his dreams as manifestations of his capacity for creative thinking and the massive influence of the horror movies he had watched as a young boy. But deep down he knew those dreams weren't just random.

The dreams began to occur regularly after his experience with Lidara but he had experienced them every night since he turned 33. His dreams always involved the torture and torment of a human female who was usually in her 20s or 30s, but occasionally, he had dreams that involved teenage and underage females. He never saw himself in his dreams or felt as if his human form was present. It was more like he was viewing the events of his dream through the eyes of whatever creature was torturing the human females. The setting of the dream was always the same: a deserted valley with dessicated, shrunken trees. The weather was usually ice cold and musty. The sky overhead was crimson and a black sun that didn't rise or set hovered above. Aside from the withered trees, the only other life forms that inhabited this surreal realm were snakes, cats and vultures. There was also the presence of what from a faraway glance appeared to be a mountain, but upon close inspection was a huge pile of decomposing corpses of human women of all races and ages. The dream always involved the torment of one female, and ended with her death. The torture process took on various forms depending on the woman. In Etibosa's previous dream, a female with chocolate skin and long black hair was hung to a horizontal beam that seemed to stay aloft without a support. Both her hands were spread eagle and stuck to both sides of the beam. A chain embellished with hundreds of little sharp spikes was flung around her neck and the tail end of the chain was pulled by the tormentor.
He could only see the hand of the tormentor and the hand seemed sufficient to carry out every task needed during the torture process. The tormentor's hands were charcoal black. The length of each finger was double the length of that of a normal human and the nails appeared dense, curved and sharp like the beak of an eagle. The young woman convulsed in extreme anguish as the spiked chains crushed her wind pipe, tearing off the flesh from her neck simultaneously. Her face began to swell and redden and her tongue pushed out of her mouth.
The tormentor flicked its fingers and a swoosh of wind tore off every clothing from the body of the girl. She was stark naked. Streams of blood trickled down her neck and unto her chest and belly. Her legs kicked continuously as she struggled for air. Out of the left hand of the tormentor appeared a long iron rod of about 6 feet long. Still pulling tightly on the chains with its right hand, the tormentor drove the iron rod into the girl's vagina and pushed it up until it burst out the top of her head. With that action, the convulsion and kicking stopped. The girl was dead and immediately Etibosa awoke.

This was how all his dreams ended and he couldn't awake from his sleep until the girl in the dream had been killed. He knew something was wrong with him, but he preferred to violate the principle of Ockham's razor and look for other alternatives to the explanation for his dreams other than the words Lidara had spoken to him 20 years ago.

just passin #nicestory

Great story, please coninue

Interesting